Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/301

Rh THE DAN LSI! VVAKS.j E N G L A N 287 I Of Sthel and Witan to pass decrees ; but it was for the king to put them in force ; and under ^Ethelrod nothing good ever was put ia force. The unready king that is the king without rede or counsel seems to have been incapable of any settled or vigorous plan of action. He showed energy now and then in needless and fruitless enterprises ; but under him the kingdom never showed an united front towards the common enemy. His only policy, the only policy of his cowardly or traitorous advisers, was the self-destroying policy of buying off the invaders with money. The invaders are met at London, at Maldon, at Exeter, with the highest valour and conduct on the part of the leaders and people of particular cities and districts ; but it is always isolated cities and districts which resist. Such local efforts were naturally fruitless ; the local force is either defeated by superior numbers, or, if victorious, it has, through want of concert with other parts of the kingdom, no means of following up its victory. Through a warfare like this, carried on year after year, the nation at last lost heart as well as its king. Local jealousies, hushed under the vigorous rule of earlier kings, now rose again. It is emphatically said that one shire would not help other. Under such a reign the efforts of the best men in the land were thwarted, and the places of highest power fell to the worst men. The successive advisers of yEthelred appear as a succession of traitors, who sold him and his kingdom to the enemy. The last of them, Eadric, whom ^Ethelred made earl of the Mercians and married to one of his many daughters, plays the chief part in the revolution which in the end placed the Dane on the English throne. The staple then of the history of this time is foreign warfare, and that mostly warfare which takes the shape of invasion of England. But this time is marked also by foreign intercourse of another kind, intercourse which may at the time have seemed of no great importance, but which helped, together with the Danish invasions, to lead the way to events greater even than the Danish conquest itself. English political intercourse with other lands had hitherto been mainly with the Franks in Germany and Gaul, and with their successors in Germany, the Saxon emperors. In the course of the tenth century, the new powers of France and Normandy had sprung up in what had been the western or Gaulish part of the Frankish dominion. The king of the French at Paris was cut off from the sea by his vassal the duke of the Normans at Rouen. While Nor mandy was a practically independent state, there could be hardly any dealings, in war or in peace, between England and France. But it was through its connexion with Normandy that England became entangled in the affairs of France, and the connexion between England and Normandy begins under /Ethelred. England and France might doubtless in the end have become rival powers in some other way ; but the way in which they actually did become rival powers was through a chain of events of which we have now reached the beginning. Two quarrels between ./Ethelred and the Norman duke Richard were ended by a peace and a marriage (1002) between /Ethelred and Richard s daughter Emma. Here was the beginning of the causes which led to the Norman Conquest. Emma brought with her Norman followers, some of whom were trusted with com mands in England. The kindred between the ruling families of the two lauds which came of the marriage of Emma led to increased intercourse between Normandy and England, to Norman interference with English affairs, to the settlement of Normans in England, to the claims of Duke William and to the Norman Conquest. When Normandy and England were under a common sovereign, France became in some sort a neighbour and an enemy of England. The rivalry between Normandy and France led to a rivalry between England and France, and that rivalry went on after France had swallowed up Normandy. Thus not only the Norman Conquest, and the internal changes which followed it, but the French wars of the four teenth and fifteenth centuries, and the long abiding enmity between Englishmen and Frenchmen, have their direct source in the events of the reign of ^Ethelred. This last series of Danish invasions began, in the form of mere plundering incursions, in 980. In 991 a formid able invasion, Norwegian rather than Danish, and in which the famous Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvessou seems to have had a share, was marked by two opposite events, each alike characteristic of the time. Brihtnotb, the ealdorman of the East-Saxons, died with his thegns around him in the fight of Maldon, and his fall is recorded in one of the noblest of Teutonic battle-songs, ^Ethelred s earl, as he calls himself in the song, met the invaders with steel ; but Ethelred himself had no arms but gold. The year of Brihtnoth s death was the very one in which the invaders were for the first time bought off with money. In 994 came a great joint invasion under the two kings of the north, Olaf of Norway and Swegen of Denmark. They were beaten off by the Londoners. ^Ethelred again bought peace ; Olaf, converted to Christianity, kept the peace and vanishes from the story ; but the war went on, if not with Swegen himself, at least with his Danes. After eight years of invasions, payments, brave local resistance, and inaction and treason at head quarters, came the general massacre of the Danes in England on the day of Saint Brice in 1002. This of course does not mean the slaughter of all the men of Danish descent in England, but simply the slaughter of those men of the invading host who had stayed in England, under cover of a treaty. Then came in 1003 a more terrible invasion by Swegen in person, when Exeter was betrayed to him by a Norman follower of the queen s. A valiant resistance in East-Anglia checked the invasion at the time, and Swegen himself did not appear again for some years. In the next stage, in 1006, the Danes first ravaged the inland part of Wessex. In 1010 comes the invasion of Thurkill ; and the battle of Ringmere near Ipswich marks the last armed resistance. In 1013 Swegen came again. All strength and all hope was now gone ; Ethelred was deposed, and took refuge in Normandy, and the Danish king was acknowledged as king though native writers choose rather to call him tyrant over all England. This Danish conquest of England, taking the form of a forced election of the conqueror, is something widely different alike from mere plundering incursions and from mere local settlements. It shows that we have got into the age of great powers. The king of an established king dom adds another crown to the one which he has already, and strives to give his conquest an outward show of legality. Swegen s conquest is in this way almost a literal foreshadowing of the more famous conquest of William. But Swegen s conquest was only for a moment ; he died the next year ; his Danish host chose his younger son Cnut as his successor; the English Witan voted the restor ation of ./Ethelred. In Denmark, it must carefully be marked, Swegen was succeeded by his elder son Harold. Cnut was chosen king over England only. A Danish dynasty was to reign in England ; it was not yet ruled that Denmark and England were to have a single king. The war was nr&amp;gt;w renewed between Cnut and Eadmund, surnamed Ironside, one of the younger sons of Ethelred. Englishmen had again a hero at their head, and, under his guidance, the whole state of affairs was changed. In the midst of this second war, in 1016, /Ethelred died. A double election took place ; Cnut and Eadmund were chosen to siicceed by two distinct bodies of the English Witan. F.admund, it would seem, was chosen, at such a Death of Briht- uoth. Massacre of Saint Brice. Swegen acknow ledged, king. First election of Cnut